On The O'Reilly Factor last night, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham complained[1] about the "far left's" use of Nazi comparisons. Ingraham claimed:

The first point I would make is comparing the far left, the people who are comparing the Republican Party to Nazis and Goebbels and so forth and the opposition to Bush's immigration reform idea is a really ridiculous comparison. I was not in that fight. I was very in close to that fight, and we actually represented the mainstream of the country. The far left and a lot of the people's sound bites you played, that is not mainstream of America. They are way off reservation on the general political thought in the United States. That is number one.

[...]

Number two, on whether he is benefiting, the President, or being hurt by the far left, I would argue that he is actually benefiting a lot from people like Congressman Cohen and Sheila Jackson Lee going nuts yesterday on the House floor. And this is -- it's because he looks quite moderate by comparison.

The outrage over Nazi comparisons is rich coming from Ingraham -- who has no apparent problem invoking the Nazis to criticize, you guessed it, Democrats.

In December 2009, as CBS News noted[3], Ingraham evoked Nazis to criticize the Democrats' health care reform efforts. CBS News reported that Ingraham closed her remarks at an anti-health care rally "by appropriating a poem that evokes a lack of resistance on the part of German intellectuals to the Nazis during their rise to power. After comparing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Grinches 'who stole health care,' Ingraham offered a spin on the poem 'First They Came,' attributed to German pastor Martin Niemöller." Ingraham's poem was subsequently mocked by Jon Stewart, who remarked[4]: "If the government begins to round up and kill the rich and the landowning and those who choose to exercise the right to bear arms... I'll speak up."

On her radio show website[5], Ingraham's staff posted a "need to know" article from Thomas Sowell who wrote that "When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. ... In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it."